I have started (yet another) blog at free-artwork.com.
About once a week (sometimes more, sometimes less) I will give away a painting or drawing. Yup, totally free. I’m giving away small stuff, so postage is cheap and not that much $$$ went into making them. I have given away 6 paintings so far.
As for the why I am doing this: well, there’s two reasons. One, I just enjoy the process of it. Posting the image, getting a ‘winner,’ and mailing out the artwork is fun.
The other reason though, has to do with the funny inner workings of my brain. When I make artwork, if I have no idea where it will go, I end up kind of lost in the process. I have no desire to create a stockpile of art- in fact, I already have that, and it’s annoying. Art is made to be seen, and the art sitting in my attic- well, it’s not being seen. (It’s also too big to give away - shipping would be over $100.)
At the same time, I like making art. It’s fun, relaxing, and engages a part of my brain that doesn’t get a workout doing anything else. I enjoy the materials, I enjoy working and reworking something.
You may ask- why not just sell the art? well, that’s where it gets a bit dicey. Selling art is actually harder than you’d think. Even at a cheap price, people are fairly reluctant to buy art. If it is priced too low, people will think it is worthless, and if the price is too high, people can’t afford it. I’m not really interested in selling prints, either- if you want a print, just go to the Flickr set and print it out yourself. (By the way, you’ve seen those fancy “Giclée” art prints, right? That means inkjet print. Hopefully archival quality, but not always.)
The truth is, selling small artworks has a razor thin profit margin. And selling things, for me, takes a lot of the magic out of creating, I start thinking about paint costs and paper costs and the ratio of these costs to what I’m selling it for and whether this artwork is sellable, etc. The profit margin goes up as volume or price increases, but I have little time to devote to making prints or more artwork.
So, the solution I came up with was to give stuff away. This way, I don’t have to worry about the pressures of selling, but I still get to send the artwork away to someone who will (hopefully) appreciate it. It improves my mental state while painting. It also gives me a nice ego boost when people say nice things about my artwork.
Of course, I started doing all this when “free” is all the rage- see this Wired article for details. This isn’t a coincidence- a few years ago, I would have never dreamed of giving away artwork. It was simply unthinkable, an undervaluation of yourself as an artist AND other artists everywhere. However - for me, now, free is much better than cheap because I can imagine the value of the artwork to be anything I want. I get around the messiness of pricing artwork while still putting it in the hands of someone that will appreciate it. The idea of free is all around, I am just taking the idea and using it to my advantage.
I can’t, of course, make a living by giving away artwork. No, I have a day job for that, and this puts me firmly back into the “hobbyist” side of the art making world. Art as hobby is a sort of dirty word in art school. “The Hobbysist” is one who does paint by numbers, Bob Ross paintings, or knock offs of other paintings (none of which, I might add, I have a problem with-as long as one doesn’t sell the knockoffs.) But the hobbyist can also be someone who makes original works, but just doesn’t want to get into the art market- because they can make more money doing something else, or because they don’t want to be self employed, or some other reason entirely.
And that brings me to the final point of this post- I realize now that I don’t really want art to become my job. At least not right now. Again, this is probably because of the weird inner-workings of my brain- but once art making becomes my job, the way I feed myself, it loses a little bit of magic. I find it hard to separate the art making process from the act of selling it to make money. I once thought I could make art and sell art and keep the two seperate from each other. I now know can’t. At least, not right now.
I will be armed with a camera and a laptop after all - that’s a bit of a change for me. I have never traveled with a laptop before. It will be interesting to see if I work it into the trip or just ignore it. It will, of course, be super useful when I make it to ALA Annual at the end of the trip. Though my liveblogging skills are no where near as good as some I might mention.